When a data storage drive, such as a hard disk drive, is used to store data, a user may wish to use the data storage drive portably at one or more locations. In a representative use, the data storage drive may be used in one or more data storage devices. The one or more data storage devices may be used to house and operate the data storage drive. The data stored in the data storage drive may be accessed and used by one or more computing devices. For example, the data may be conveniently viewed by displaying it onto a suitable monitor or television set. Each of the one or more data storage devices may facilitate the incorporation of additional data storage drives or hard disk drives. On occasion, a user of the one or more data storage devices may wish to incorporate a data storage drive obtained from another data storage device. For example, a data storage drive may be portably transferred from a data storage device used at a workplace to a data storage device used at a home. When this occurs, the configuration data used at the workplace may not be retained and utilized when the data storage drive is used at the home. The configuration data may provide information related to the concatenation of one or more sectors of one or more data storage drives. This configuration data may be used to mount various RAID data pools. The RAID data pools may comprise RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 0+1 data pools, for example. The configuration data may also contain metadata associated with access control of certain files. The metadata may comprise one or more passwords and files used to perform administrative control of data pools and data files. Unfortunately, the configuration data may not be available or may not be functional when the data storage drive is moved from one data storage device to another. Thus, one or more data pools that were previously used may not be available when the data storage drive is powered on. Consequently, data that was previously accessible may not be accessible when a data storage drive is transferred from one data storage device to another.
The limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.